Context

Tool mentors explain how a tool can perform tasks, which are part of ITUP processes and activities. The tasks are listed as Related Elements in the Relationships section.

You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   IT Service Continuity Management
  •   Create and Maintain IT Service Continuity Plan

Details

IT Service Continuity Management is concerned with managing the ability of an organization to continue to provide a pre-determined and agreed level of IT services to support the minimum business requirements, following an interruption to the business. Current business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans should be considered when creating and maintaining the IT service continuity plan.

IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager can play a significant role in the creation and maintenance of the IT Service Continuity Plan and can be integrated into the process in a number of ways. First, each business will have a unique definition of a set of minimum business requirements for quality of service (QOS) and service level agreements (SLAs) with customers in terms of data availability and protection. Tivoli Storage Manager policy can be configured to match these business requirements in order to provide the appropriate QOS needed to meet established SLAs.

When data availability and protection SLAs have been defined to meet business requirements, it is important to determine the types and total amount of data that will need to be protected so that a Tivoli Storage Manager architecture can be designed to meet the SLAs. The architecture will determine the Tivoli Storage Manager infrastructure in terms of the number of Tivoli Storage Manager servers, clients, storage resources, administrators, and processes that are required to support the SLAs.

Tivoli Storage Manager provides specific capabilities for disaster recovery planning through its DRM feature. DRM is an automated process that helps to ensure that data can be recovered in the event of a disaster. Tivoli Storage Manager stores data in virtualized storage pools. Information about this data is stored in the Tivoli Storage Manager database. To protect against disaster, copies of the Tivoli Storage Manager storage pools and database must be made and stored off-site. DRM can be used to manage the state and location of volumes to indicate whether they should be moved off-site or back on-site.

Furthermore, in the event of a disaster the copies of the database and storage pools might need to be restored to an alternate location. To help clarify and speed up this process, DRM generates a plan that is automatically updated, typically on a daily basis, and also stored off-site along with the storage pool and database copies. DRM allows the plan to include business-specific instructions and information such as where the vault is located, which couriers are in use, and key contact information. DRM also provides ways of prioritizing data so that in the event of a recovery, the business data with the highest value can be restored first, helping to ensure that the defined restore SLAs are met.

By providing flexible policy capabilities, and features such as DRM, Tivoli Storage Manager can play a significant role in the creation and maintenance of the IT Service Continuity Plan.

For more information, refer to:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/index.jsp?toc=/com.ibm.itstorage.doc/toc.xml

For information on managing the data lifecyle you can search for:

• "Policy Configuration Scenarios"
• "Using Disaster Recovery Manager"

The following IBM Redbooks and papers also provide useful and related information:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/cgi-bin/searchsite.cgi?query=sg24-6844

For More Information

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